Entries on politics

Has the mainstream left gone insane in response to these town halls on health care reform? When you have what you see is an illegitimate process set up to provide the appearance of taking people's views into consideration when in fact the outcome is a foregone conclusion, then of course you try to shut down that process.

On Saturday, Republican vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin came to Philadelphia. ACT-UP/Philly, among many other groups, called for an organized protest. I showed up and took some pictures. I even made a video of the protest of which I'm quite proud. In wanting to represent the breadth of the protest, however, I took some pictures of people wearing shirts that attacked Sarah Palin using language demeaning to women.

UfPJ and allied groups, which seemed early on to have strong connections to the global justice movement, seems to have been transformed — in the hopes of attracting more "mainstream" participants — into not an anti-war organization, but an anti-Iraq War organization; not a pro-peace movement, but a pro-better-war-policy movement. Few connections are made to "the soul of America," as King would describe it, and much attention is focused on those things that are at best cogs in the system — individual policies on the war, planning or lack thereof for the war, and particular Republicans in Congress and the White House. Yet these problems go considerably beyond Bush and Republicans.

Last Friday, more than 850 students from 46 states around the country came to Washington for the Power to Protect: D.C. to Darfur conference, sponsored by the Genocide Intervention Network and Students Taking Action Now: Darfur.

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